I thought I would pass along some info I recently found about these AtGames Genesis/Mega Drive products. While AtGames is the Sega license holder, the actual hardware in their products was designed by someone else. Specifically, they were done by a company called Digital Media Cartridge. Take a look at this press release from 2005:
Digital Media Cartridge's Titan 1.0 32-Bit RISC Chip. I searched for more info about this company but could not determine whether they were still active. However, I did find some other interesting info. For example, 2 consultants who worked for the company:
Resume for Marat Fayzullin shows that this guy worked for them from 2005 to 2007 and did "hardware design and software techniques for emulating hardware," particularly "gaming hardware platforms based on dual ARM, 68000, and Z80 CPU cores." Also note this
LinkedIn page for Toshiyasu Morita, who consulted for DMC briefly. The page notes: "Analyzed 68000 interpreter running on an ARM implementation and recommended several strategies for improving performance. Fixed sound bugs in an OPN 4-op FM synthesis emulator." These two resume notes indicate that AtGames' hardware actually uses an an emulator (interpreter for the 68000 running on 32-bit ARM architecture) rather than something like the Flashback 2 (which actually runs the original binaries directly in hardware). Incidentally, Morita was pretty well qualified for helping them with Genesis emulation, since he was Sega of America's Technical Director for 7 years, as noted in his resume and in
this Sega-16.com interview. Strange, though, that his resume specifically mentions fixing sound bugs, yet we still have complaints about the sound in these AtGames products being inferior. Maybe there were still bugs, or just hurdles he couldn't overcome.
The most interesting part of this for me (aside from Morita's involvement) was finding out that there really is at least one example of a plug-and-play (or standalone handheld) product which runs an emulator. Usually, you get re-coded ports running on hardware like Sunplus or Winbond architectures (check out
this resume from a former interactive technology senior manager at Jakks Pacific--it's a Word document, but Google can display it as HTML for you), and sometimes you get hardware that natively runs original binaries (e.g., Flashback 2 and C64 DTV), though still not necessarily with full original behavioral replication. That someone actually went the path of using software emulation is a bit surprising, since it generally would be more expensive. I guess they found an economical way to do it this time--though they still needed at least 2 consultants to do it.
onmode-ky
. . . You know, I seem to remember reading somewhere that Digital Eclipse's Atari Paddles TV Game for Jakks Pacific used an emulator to run the original Atari binaries on Jakks' hardware (if it was a 32-bit architecture, I suppose emulating something as primitive as the 2600 wouldn't really be hard--but I do wonder if they did the same for that excellent rendition of arcade
Warlords). Was it here at AtariAge where I read that? Maybe.
1
Asaki, on Sun Jul 20, 2008 9:37 PM, said:
